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The Liberty Campaign strongly believe that guns do not kill people poverty kills people. Almost all of the gun violence in the USA is restricted to large depressed cities, where jobs and opportunity have been sacrificed on th altar of globalism. Our article here. Now we see that despite growing gun ownership, the homicide rate is at a 50 year low. We dont need gun control, we need jobs!

The 2014 total follows a long downward trend and is the lowest homicide rate recorded since 1963 when the rate was 4.6 per 100,000. To find a lower homicide rate, we must travel back to 1957 when the total homicide rate hit 4.0 per 100,000.

Homicide rates were considerably higher in the United States during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, but over the past 25 years, have fallen nearly continuously (above)

So, do more guns equal more crime? The data would seem to indicate the answer is “obviously not.” (For more on this, see here.)

Naturally, these facts are steadfastly ignored by people who can’t do basic arithmetic, like the constitutional law Professor David S. Cohen who wrote Monday at Rolling Stone that the second Amendment must be repealed because it is “a threat to liberty” and a “suicide pact.”

Cohen’s argument rests largely on the idea that gun violence it out of control and that guns are different now than they were in the 18th century. One cannot argue with the latter part. But are guns significantly different today from what they were twenty years ago? Clearly, the answer to that is no, and given that homicide rates have plummeted since then, Cohen needs to explain why repealing the second Amendment is advisable when increases in gun ownership have coincided with declines in homicides.

Moreover, we must ask ourselves if the US was engaged in a “suicide pact” in the 1940s and 1950s when homicide rates where at historic lows, when the Second Amendment existed, and when gun control measures were very weak by modern standards.

But what about the murders at the Pulse club last weekend? Won’t that cause homicide rates to go back up? Anyone familiar with math, of course, will know that in a country of 300 million people a mass shooting like this will have virtually no effect on overall homicide rates at all. But even if we pull out Florida specifically, homicide rates will remain well below what they were in the 1980s even if we include last weekend’s murders. For example, in 2014, there were 1,149 homicides in Florida. That’s out of a population of 20.2 million people, for a homicide rate of about 5.6 per 100,000. In 1984 — a fairly average year for homicide in Florida in those days — there were 1,264 homicides in a population of 11 million. That comes out to a homicide rate of 11.4 per 100,000. (The nation at the time had a homicide rate of about 7.9 per 100,000)

Now, I’m not saying that homicides are no big deal if the trend is downward. Nor am I saying there’s anything wrong with wanting to drive the homicide rate even lower. However, panicky claims that the US has entered into a suicide pact or that the nation is on the precipice of violent implosion are simply not grounded in reality.